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Kubuntu won't be switching to Mir / XMir, has announced Jonathan Riddell, the main Kubuntu developer, in a recent blog post.

In the same article, Jonathan mentions some recent screenshots posted by Thomas Voß, Technical Architect at Canonical, which show that KDE, among other desktop environments, can run on XMir (a layer that allows running X11 applications on top of Mir). However, he says that:

"[...] compositing is very fragile, even Ubuntu shipping the latest Mesa can increase the number of beasties the poor KWin developers have to handle with because of unexpected issues it creates. Putting another layer between KWin and your monitor is certain to create new issues so I'll be keeping anything to do with Mir off the Kubuntu images."

The distro will continue to use X by default for the 13.10 release which is currently under development, and for the 14.04 LTS release which will arrive next year. After14.04 LTS, Kubuntu will probably switch to Wayland, "which is what KDE and every other Linux distro hopes to do", says Jonathan.

There are still things to figure out though, like what happens if an Ubuntu Desktop user installs Kubuntu Desktop or the other way around - the Kubuntu developers will need to find a way to deal with this until Ubuntu makes the switch to Mir which, according to the initial Mir announcement, should happen with Ubuntu 14.04 (April 2014).